Good for guidelines, but lacking on design

Resources on how to use each of the UI controls and dialog styles in which circumstance are scattered throughout the MSDN library and articles. This book does a great job of bringing all of that information together into one place and, as such, is a reasonable first reference manual on how to put together a UI application.

However, this book didn't cover what I expected to see: how do you design a good UI? Given a set of three activities to do, how do you map that into a flow across the application? How do you do simple usability studies using a friend or family? I was sorely disappointed, as those techniques are what turn a UI from a set of controls that a developer slapped together into an application that feels like it was designed to be used for a purpose.

Also, don't think that this goes into all of the details. Given the depth he went into on control use, I was expecting to see some of the Windows Logo guidelines in there, perhaps as an appendix - buttons will be such and such dialog units from the corner, etc. Instead, there are intro chapters on *forming* Avalon and HTML. This seemed out of place given that there was no intro chapter on using the Visual Studio .NET design surfaces and they read more like there was a page target for the book than that the content was part of an overall plan for the reader.

Other Reviews

• OK for beginners and not too basic for experienced developers
• Good for guidelines, but lacking on design
• Good at covering the basics
• Most Developers are not great Designers
• Lacking Good Technical Content